


In which Gil learns about consent

by Overlord_Bethany



Series: blundering onward [3]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Biting, Ficlet, Multi, OT3, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 12:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11874048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlord_Bethany/pseuds/Overlord_Bethany
Summary: ...which is a lesson he desperately needs.





	In which Gil learns about consent

Afternoon sunlight streamed in the open window, catching fine specks of dust mid-dance. Near the door, Agatha stood with Jenka, their heads bent in quiet conversation. Tarvek sat across the room from them, at a moment’s rest amid a sea of papers. He stretched in his chair, his legs crossing at the ankles, his hands clasping behind his head. He watched them in silence until Jenka took her leave. 

“Your pardon, Lady Heterodyne,” he said, and he flashed a winning smile when he drew her eye. “There seems to be a ginger gentleman adoring you over here.”

“A shifty-looking ginger,” Gil grumbled. Tarvek’s rebuttal came swiftly, as he expected. 

“Shifty is cute on me.”

Gil glanced up from an open access panel. “Is it?” He could claim he hadn’t noticed, but it would be a lie. And why bother lying to himself? Shifty felt right. A keen twinge of nostalgia: two boys clinging to the underside of a catwalk, sharing a secret smile. Gil glared defiance at the first person ever to treat him like he wasn’t in some way defective. Tarvek smirked at him.

“Sure, it is.” He uncrossed his ankles, stretched down to his toes, crossed them the other direction. “Shifty and crafty and tactically brilliant. What do you think, Agatha?”

“Hah, no. I’m too smart to get caught up in this.”

“Ooh,” Tarvek purred, his attention riveted on Agatha once more. “This shifty ginger gentleman is adoring you even more.”

Gil’s lips pressed together into a hard line. Shifty. Tarvek had taken the word he had tossed out as a casual insult and made it his own. He had claimed Gil’s description of him. Had the air suddenly gone out of the room?

Agatha prowled across to Tarvek. Her lips curved into a smile that hinted at the possibility that a Heterodyne may bite. As she leaned over Tarvek, Gil felt his own heart rate rising. Her hands glided along the leather arms of the chair. Her knee lifted, slid up and over Tarvek’s knee, continued up his thigh. Fabric whispered on fabric. First point of contact. Gil gulped air in short, shallow breaths. But for his rapt stare, Tarvek remained motionless as Agatha closed the distance between them. Her hair fell forward, brushed against his shoulder. Gil choked back a tiny, strangled noise an instant before they kissed. 

He wanted it, wanted to taste their passion for each other, wanted to be the space between them. He looked away. Focus, Gil. Calm down. He slammed the access panel shut, and pain exploded through his finger. 

Really, Gil?

Embarrassed and blinking his watering eyes clear, he stuck his injured fingertip into his mouth. The finger he’d just slammed in the access panel. Brilliant work, that. He sighed. 

He glanced back toward Agatha and Tarvek. She kept one foot on the floor still, but she had slid most of the way into his lap. Tarvek had rested one hand on her knee, the other playing in her hair. The blood rushed in Gil’s ears. He tried to swallow the sudden dryness in his mouth. They looked perfect. He craved that perfection, longed with all his strength to join them. When had he taken a step forward? He should retreat. Someone was sure to get hurt. 

Then he caught sight of Tarvek watching him. One eye just cracked open, glittering with—was that amusement? Did Tarvek laugh at him? Gil hid his injured hand behind his back. Then, with a motion slow and deliberate, Tarvek lifted his hand from Agatha’s knee, extended it, beckoned. 

Right, don’t vault across the room now. Hesitating instead, Gil shuffled toward them. He reached out, caught at Tarvek’s hand. Tarvek twisted his grip, interlacing their fingers, tugging Gil closer. Yes, please. Gil’s heart raced. Tarvek watched him through lowered eyelashes, contented, predatory…

Tarvek never moved too quickly for Gil to track—he was fast, certainly, but Violetta was the faster. He did, however, possess a singular skill at striking without warning, from a relaxed posture. Not a muscle tensed before the attack. His breathing came steady, his expression remaining unchanged. Fascinating, Gil often thought, and dead useful. It was also how Gil found himself at that moment toppling backward, Tarvek’s foot hooked between his ankles. Caught off guard, of all the unforgivable carelessness. 

Gil landed flat on his back, the air rushing out of him in a yelp. Agatha pounced before he could catch his breath, pinning him down by hips and shoulders. …What?

Had they planned this?

They gave him little time to entertain his suspicions. Agatha kissed him, her touch soft and warm at first, but soon growing urgent. Still struggling a little for air, Gil pushed back, kissing her harder. Focus. Don’t ruin this. He felt the cool floor against his back, the warmth of their mingled breath. Agatha’s knees and palms dug in, maybe bruising him a little, maybe just finding the right pressure points to feel like it. He could do this. He could. He just had to—

A sharp tug of teeth on his earlobe shattered Gil’s self control. A hand skimmed down his chest, nimble fingers unbuttoning buttons as they went. Tarvek’s teeth, Tarvek’s hand, Tarvek’s tongue sweeping up the outside of his ear. Agatha drank deeply of the groan rising from his throat. The scattered fragments of his focus burned up in the heat of their touch. Agatha and Tarvek. They were his. The most important people in his life, the two people he needed most… He caught Agatha by the waist and, unmindful of the strength of his grip, he pulled her down atop him, trapping Tarvek’s hand between them. Her gasp ended in a laugh. The sound of it seared through the darkest corners of his brain, awakening a howling need, a frenzy rising within him. He could almost taste the biting, the clawing, rending…

No. 

“N-no,” he panted. “Stop.”

It stopped. Everything. Agatha’s mouth vanished from his. Tarvek’s teeth released his ear. His eyes squeezed closed, Gil focused on his own ragged breathing. Calm. Be calm, dammit. Neither panic nor ravenous lust was terribly helpful. One breath after another. Slowly, now. Slowly. He opened his eyes. 

Agatha and Tarvek sat back from him, still near enough to touch, but giving him space. They watched him, concern and confusion plain on their faces. No hurt. No rage. They just… waited. Gil felt a blush creeping up his cheeks. 

“What just happened?” Was that really the most sensible thing he could think of to say?

“You said stop.”

“We stopped.”

Well, obviously. Gil mentally reviewed the last few moments. Agatha and Tarvek had had him nearly helpless between them, but he’d really only needed a moment to catch his breath, to regain control. Yet here they were, at arm’s reach, looking to him for… for what?

“Why?” Oh, dammit, Gilgamesh. Asking the stupidest questions possible. 

Agatha’s face paled with… Was that rage? Her lips pressed together into a hard line. A muscle in her jaw twitched. What? Say something, beloved. Absolve me of this idiocy. 

It was Tarvek who reached for his hand, freezing an instant before their fingers touched, waiting. Yes, please. Gil caught his hand. Will you save us from this awkwardness?

“Gil…” Tarvek spoke in a quiet, steady tone that nearly hid the murder glinting in his eyes. “I have fought harder than you will ever know for my personal boundaries. I won’t take yours from you now.”

“Oh.” Oh? Was that really the best he could manage? “I didn’t know—”

“That you could say NO?” Agatha’s lip quivered with fury. “I want to light your father on fire.”

“Ah, I don’t think that would help?”

Agatha bared her teeth in a ferocious Heterodyne grin. “It would make me feel better.”

Well, who hadn’t ever wanted to immolate someone? Gil looked between Agatha and Tarvek, struggling to sort out the facts. They were both angry on his behalf. They wanted to protect him. Wanted him to choose? “Look, I… I’m sorry—”

“SORRY?!” Agatha was up on one knee, perhaps ready to sprint for the lab to build a terrifying doomsday device. “Oho, SOMEONE will be SORRY.”

“I’m sorry,” Gil repeated more firmly. “I’m fine, really. I just needed to catch my breath.”

Tarvek’s stare cut right through him. “You’re lying.”

Only a little. Gil felt color rising in his cheeks. How much could he tell them, when he could scarcely believe it himself? That he wanted to tear these two to pieces to prove that they were his? “I don’t want to hurt you,” he mumbled, a pallid version of the truth. 

“Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, tell me this isn’t about the split lip.”

“Um…” Gil shrank away from Tarvek. “Only a little?”

Tarvek leaned close, almost nose to nose with him. Eyes narrowed, accusing. “What makes you think you’ll hurt us?”

Gil held his breath for a moment as he fought back an impulse to bite. He wanted a taste, wanted to mark Tarvek as his. The queasy free fall sensation inside him intertwined with the familiar thrum of mild aggression. “I… seem to forget my own strength. When sufficiently distracted.”

“Gil, you’re a scientist,” Tarvek scoffed. “You can say it. Sufficiently aroused.”

How did that man always know just the right words to make him blush? Gil scowled. “I really hate you sometimes.”

“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” 

“Are you trying to start a fight?” He didn’t mean it. Not really. Tarvek remained uncomfortably close, smirking just a breath away. Gil inhaled the heady spice and resin scent of his hair, the warm amber of his shave soap. No, he didn’t want to fight. 

“There, you see?” Tarvek’s smirk broke into a grin. His lips looked delicious. “What’s a little more blood between you and me?”

Oh. Well, he had a point there. 

“Gil.” Agatha’s hand on his arm should have dragged him free of the intoxicating nearness of Tarvek. He remembered the feeling of her pinning him to the floor. Fighting for each shallow breath past the thundering of his heart, he stared at her hand. “Can you trust us to stop you if you ever go too far?”

Gil struggled to process what he heard. Could they stop him? Possibly. Would he let them try? Agatha’s thumb swept in a distracting arc on the inside of his forearm. She didn’t know the risk she asked him to take, to gamble with their safety. Could he do it?

“Gil…”

He watched her fingertips whiten with the pressure as she gave his arm a squeeze. 

“Do you trust us?”

This was a trap, wasn’t it? A trick question? Closing his eyes, Gil nodded. His reward was a kiss, swift, searing, and far too brief. He opened his eyes. Agatha hadn’t moved, but Tarvek sat back from him, smirking again. 

Gil sighed. “This isn’t fair, the two of you against me.” He didn’t mean a word of it. That they would fight for him against himself, the thought of it filled him with warmth, made him feel a little lighter. 

“You like it.”

Had Tarvek read the expression on his face? “What if I don’t?” Purely hypothetical. “You did throw me on the ground not that long ago.” Please do it again. 

“Oh, Gil.” Agatha leaned close, her hand on his chest. Could she feel his heart drumming a ferocious tempo? Her breath hot on his ear, she purred, “I’m convinced you enjoyed that.”

He could grab her right now, take a fistful of her hair, twist it around his hand… He could kiss her hard, yank her head to the side… He could almost feel flesh give beneath his teeth…

“Gil?” Tarvek watched him, a hint of concern shadowing his face.

Drawing a shuddering breath, Gil pressed two fingertips to his temple. “Sorry, I’m not so good at—”

“Emotions?”

“Relationships?”

“Not stuffing your foot so far into your mouth that your toes find out what you had for breakfast?”

Wow, great, but what do you really think? Gil frowned. “Opening up,” he said, glancing between Agatha and Tarvek. Despite their brutal honesty, they both gazed at him, eyes bright, smiles sincere. “Thanks.”

Agatha’s lips brushed against his cheek, just ahead of his ear. “You’re doing fine.”

He didn’t really feel like it, but who was he to judge? He just had to keep trying. Had to keep moving forward. He slid his hand over Agatha’s hip, pulled her closer. Her body pressed warm against his, and when Gil realized he could think of nothing to say, he kissed her. 

Gil savored the kiss for several long moments before he felt the weight of Tarvek’s stare. He opened one eye. Tarvek leaned forward, each breath coming shallow, lips slightly parted as though parched. His eyes gleamed with a hunger Gil had felt not so long ago, when Agatha had kissed Tarvek. When Tarvek had beckoned to him. Well. Gil reached out, caught Tarvek by the shirt collar, tugged him closer. A faint shadow of that damnable smirk reappeared. 

Tarvek took Agatha’s hand and lifted it to his lips. Not once breaking eye contact with Gil, he dragged his tongue in a lazy, sensual movement along one finger. Gil nearly choked on a shuddering gasp. What was he trying to…? Tarvek trailed Agatha’s damp fingertip down Gil’s chest. 

Gil sputtered a curse. Laughing, Tarvek reached for him, reached for a kiss, but Gil moved faster, catching him, biting his shoulder, biting hard enough to bruise. Mine. Mine forever, mine. Tarvek gasped a gasp that almost sounded like words, sounded like, “Love you.”

Panting, each breath ragged, almost pained, Gil let his forehead drop onto Tarvek’s freshly bruised shoulder. He was in too deep here. He should run. Flee before someone got seriously hurt. He had to…

He had to trust them. 

Fingers sifted through his hair, stroking the back of his neck. It hardly mattered whose. The touch mattered. The gentle encouragement. Tarvek slumped against him, murmuring disjointed nonsense phrases, switching too rapidly between Romanian, Czech, Polish, Ukranian, and a few other languages that flew by before Gil could identify them. Agatha watched them both, her eyes shining, a hint of a flush creeping over her cheeks. They wanted him. Monster or no, they wanted to keep him. Gil held them tightly. He kissed Agatha’s mouth, Tarvek’s neck, Agatha’s collarbone. He held them, and he let go of his fear, let go of his self-derision. 

He closed his eyes, and he trusted them.


End file.
